How To Enhance Your Android App's Productivity

The productivity of your Android-based app not only depends on your in-depth knowledge and expertise but also on the toolset, configuration and team collaboration. It will be good that you follow the below-mentioned practices so that you can easily enhance the productivity of your application. In this blog, you will read about few key points that will make your app stable and efficient.

What does your AndroidManifest really look like?

A lot of us are already aware that the AndroidManifest.xml that you see in the text editor is not always the same as the one which was included while building an application. This thing happens mainly because the libraries which you will add in your project may have an extra <uses-permission/> element in their manifest which is usually blended with the permissions requested in your manifest file. You can also take help of a skilled Android developer to locate these permissions.

It will be good that you check your manifest before building an APK of your app. The new feature of Android Studio 2.2 has a merged manifest viewer. This will tool will display your AndroidManifest that has been merged in your project dependencies based on the variants, flavours and build types. You can access this tool by navigating to your AndroidManifest.xml and then clicking on the new Merged Manifest located at the bottom.

Support annotations are your friends

Another useful tool is the support-annotations library. Make sure you include them in your project by adding “com.android.support:support-annotations:23.4.0” into your build.gradle file. With these metadata annotations, you will enable your code to detect bugs and define code rules. Most of the time, use-cases are used for marking nullable and non-nullable or to specify from which thread they should be called while doing Android development.

Fast and Painless code review

For every developer, it is essential to review his code at least three to four times. It makes sense to check how effectively the developed feature works. The common workflow in this case is:

• Change the stashes of your current branch
• Review your branch
• Reload the gradle configuration in your IDE
• Thoroughly read the code in IDE
• First compile and launch, then test the app
• Get back to your work by repeating your actions from 1 to 5.

Make sure you use a dedicated IDE instance and repository folder to review your code. It will be good that you should use a machine that has at least 16GB of RAM so that you don't have to face any lag while carrying out this task.

Apply changes fast

No matter what is the size of your Android app development project you should always spend enough time to build and deploy the latest changes into the emulator or test device. In case you have hundreds of classes and XML layouts that it will definitely cost your more time, resources and even a more powerful machine. Apart from that, you need to navigate everything manually on the application screen, so if you changed something you will have a hard time reaching it.

Conclusion

In this blog, you will be reading about few crucial tips that will assist you in increasing the productivity of your Android app.